TaleSpire

Cant recommend at the moment, to get a recommend from me, you need to take the seat cost for players and divide that by 3.,

This is an amazing VTT game, where you can literally just use other maps and customise them, or make your own from scratch. There's a vast array of different things to build with, and quite a lot of free minis. It also has a unique art style and looks great. Furthermore, it's not difficult to learn at all. I've ran over about 150 hours of actual D&D gaming, with the rest being used for map making. So far, myself and my players have no regrets with using it, and switching to online certainly has its benefits. However, something has to be said with the direction of development. It pains me to say it, since the game shines in many areas and the developers in the discord are quite vocal and open to talk about people's likes and dislikes without getting angsty, which is great. But, the lack of substantial features for the game like; fog of war, mini creation, dice customisation (Seriously why isn't this in the game yet when the whole game revolves around these dice?), extra immersion features like weather or visual effects. We understand development of a game takes time, nobody is debating that. But for a game that has been in early-access development for 4 years now, and that doesn't have these fun, appealing features you can understand why people get annoyed. It's also the fact that many of these features are "Planned" on their roadmap, and their inclusion onto the planned section dates back a couple years sometimes. Their huge focus on modding seems to have dampened their focus on other built-in features unfortunately. Edit: I have to comment on the above paragraph since in hind-sight I was quite ignorant to the development process. Yes I stand-by the fact that modding has taken priority over other features, and that I wish development was quicker. However, having spoken here and there to the devs in their discord, and looking at their conversations with others, I can see why development is so slow. It's simply because its not easy work at all, and they do knuckle-down to get features out as quick as they can, and with the least amount of bugs possible which is so good to see from modern-day development teams. Take what I said with a grain of salt, besides the things I stand-by. Although, despite this, I would recommend it. Who knows, I may be proved wrong in some months time. If you need a VTT thats reliable, easy to use and that runs/looks good, then Talespire is definitely one of the best options.

So I will say as a DM, the tools and assets are great, but one aspect of Talespire completely removes the ability for me to want to use it : the need to purchase "seats" for the players Dnd was a hobby that can be done very cheap, thats why we play it to begin with, and with most of our friends living in different time zones, we have to resort to online tools. If you buy the game, you can make and design maps! Fantastic! but if you want to allow players to see and use the maps, $15 per seat at the table, we usually have 6 or so players in our sessions to now were looking at $70 (at the cheapest) on top of the base game. at this point ill be looking for alternatives, if they lower the price to something realistic then I'd love to come back.

I'm a pretty avid 3D modeler and this game is like a lucid dream, just dropping assets down and optimizing block counts to achieve amazing results in such a small time, I built an entire kingdom wall complete with towers in just 4 hours. The houses are a learning curve though!

Debería advertir al comienzo de la compra que para poder jugar con otros jugadores NECESITAS comprar asientos para ellos, aunque este juego me lo regalaron en rebajas, literalmente tengo que pagarme lo mismo que vale el Baldur's Gate 3 para jugarlo con 4 personas. Por ese precio otros modelos como los de Foundry VTT vienen que ni pintado, ofrece mejores herramientas y, aunque es verdad que no cuenta con la opción de tener una visualización 3D, al menos te da más soporte a mods y una visualización de hoja de personaje 13 euros por una silla y 42 por 4 sillas es un precio exorbitante, no me merece la pena para lo simple que es el programa y la poca compatibilidad con otros VTT, (nula, de hecho)

Great for playing dnd with others. I wish I didn't have to pay for seats but got them on a winter sale.

As someone who has had relative success with Talespire, I can recommend it. At first, it wasn't for me. But I saw they had a roadmap, so I sat back and let them cook and continued to use the game for my tabletop as they developed. I've played in and ran games with Talespire. I'll list the positives that stand out to me, then some items that people seem to take for-granted or fail to use, then I'll get to some requests / improvements / Downsides. The Positive: - Great graphics / lighting / music options - The ability to customize your board and set the music, theme, fog, time of day, etc at a whim is amazing. - Many tile-sets that mesh seamlessly together. - Symbiotes (baked-in community mods) It's much less of a hassle to use these than having to get an external 3rd party mod client. - Custom Minis importable via TaleWeaver. (Thank god, this made the game so much better.) - Effortless token resizing / Status changing / torch-holding / renaming / etc. - Water raising / lowering. Atmospheric fog. Various effects and ways to customize weather, or theme the place. You can make anywhere look like a hell-scape or a beautiful spring day with a few adjustments of sliders. - SLABS! These are so good! Slabs are community made structures that you can just copy, rotate, place, etc directly onto your map. - Morphs. You can set a token to have multiple states called morphs, which replaces the token with another token. (IE: You can make a chest token turn into a Mimic token.) - Cloud storage. I've had to reinstall operating systems quite alot recently, switching between various versions of Linux. It's been nice having my hard-made maps and campaign boards stored on a cloud rather than locally. I'm just glad they don't charge for this. What People Seem To Miss - If you hold Control while placing objects, you can override the snapping. This allows you to create custom shapes or infer an object is something else from a different viewpoint. I saw a complaint that there weren't many bushes - you're right, but you can submerge trees at various angles into the ground to get new bushes. Hell you can take the same original bush and just force a bunch of them together with some flowers or sticks to make it look different - and save that as a template for further placements in the future via the Slab system. If you really want to, you could basically make your own tile-sets this way. It just requires you to put in some effort and creativity. - Heroforge is great and people are just being haters. The fact that I can import my previously made heroes to this game is fantastic. Heroforge is the easiest way to create a 3D model AND paint it. If you want custom minis put in for free, then use Taleweaver. Taleweaver allows you to import STL's or other 3d model files, and import / upload them into the game. It also allows you to customize tokens. It's popular these days to have an AI make a 3d STL file based on input of a reference image. It's ALMOST effortless - just alot to learn upfront. And if you can't grasp it, just use the Heroforge importer and make minis on Heroforge the easy/fun way. The Bad / Requests: - Camera navigation has gotten better over the years - but I would still appreciate it if I didn't have to turn off token viewpoint everytime I open the game. Token viewpoint is when you move a token, your view suddenly becomes its view. More often than not, I don't want that / would rather set it manually because it's too fiddly when automated. - I would appreciate the potential to have Area-Specific water layers. We have "Tempwater" tiles, they're pretty good. But if I could draw an area on the map or use specific tiles to outline an area that I could have a separate kind of water, that'd be great - as opposed to having just one major water layer cover the entire map at only one height. This makes it tricky for times I want a huge lake a-top a plateau as compared to the ocean down below. Again- yes, tempwater could solve this. But it's not quite as easy as having a separate water layer function. - Fog multiplier seems to reset to medium every time I open a board / the game. Would be nice if it didn't do that anymore and remember my preference. - Fog of War. The current experimental for Fog of War works pretty good. But I would like a toggle of "Erase All" or "Erase Selected Area." When I used Fog of War the first time, it was... a nightmare to erase it. Otherwise, works fine. Just make it easier to erase. - The price of "Seats." Look here's a realworld example that just happened. - Tonight I was talking with a group of 6 who wants to do Pathfinder 2e. Everyone was amazed by Talespire and was excited to use it as the game option. Out of the group, I was the only one with Talespire. Once they heard the price-tag they immediately went from "Oh my god this is amazing!" to "Nope, let's just use Foundry." That sticker price for Seats is bogus. I've already bought my main crew of 8 people Talespire back when it was 50 dollars as a group christmas present - we still run that campaign today two years later. Had I known seats was coming? I'd have held off and just bought seats. Given how successful this game is and has sold at full price (Because honestly, no one expected the price to come down) the price of entry for an entire crew is too much with the current seats price. If I wanted to be nice and buy this crew seats to get in, it'd cost me nearly 80 bucks with taxes to do that. I already spent 50 / full copy on a crew of 8 already. Feels bad - and it feels like I've given Talespire too much money - so now, this group I tried to talk into using talespire is going to use Foundry instead. - More simple small objects would be nice. I found it weird that there's cards in the game as a prop, but no dice. Also no coins, only massive piles of gold. Look, I know this goes against my earlier point regarding slabs - but small objects can't be created from large objects very easily - especially objects that are typically found on a table. More small, singular objects please. TL;DR Talespire is great, and gets the job done and more. It has a few hang-ups and desired features that aren't complete yet, but I'm sure they'll get there. There are many features that people don't understand exist - whether it be because they haven't spent much time within the game and experimenting - or they simply don't think outside the box. The pricing for multiple players is a bit wild - but atleast the main price has come down by more than half over the years. Seats cost too much, so it's a high-bar to get a full crew into the game. But atleast seats are re-useable for different members / adventures.

Use Foundry VTT instead

(This is a review and a sort of buyers-guide, so it'll be long) [hr][/hr] [h2]TL;DR Review[/h2] + TaleSpire is the best multi-player interactive [b]Three-dimensional[/b] world building sandbox yet produced by humankind. + TaleSpire has no peer for table-top miniature combat in 3 dimensions. Period. + It has great graphics, lighting, and effects relative to its scale, complexity and sandbox nature. There is a good list of quality ambient background sounds and music (with both fantasy and sci-fi offerings in both), and the built-in tools for measuring distance as well as showing exact areas for sphere, cone, and line AoE spells/effects are superb and easy to use. There are a huge number of mods, plug-ins, and API integrations (such as D&D Beyond and Roll-20 Character Sheets, for example.) + It's a small dev group with most members doing multiple jobs on Talespire, and updates are constant and community content is massive and high quality. - With such limitless sandbox options and the exponentially increased difficulty in implementing certain desired features in this 3D space, there are many features that are common to 2D VTTs that are either not yet implemented, or are currently implemented in a more cumbersome way (Fog of War, for example). ? The DM/GM needs to be willing to put in some moderate effort to facilitate a good experience, and a high level of effort to really get the most out of TaleSpire (Building quality custom boards does take some time!). The interface and options take a bit of getting used to, and can even seem off-putting/daunting at first. Know this. Embrace this. Hit it head on and you will love the results. Check out Nket's YouTube tips/tutorials as a great starting point. ? The players need to be willing to put in some setup time and a low-moderate effort to understanding the 3D camera controls etc. Expect the first few sessions to need a bit of patience with everyone getting those controls learned. There are also a lot of REALLY helpful plugins (With a simple plugin install, you can have your D&D Beyond character sheet up and simply click in that browser window to label/apply modifiers to your dice roll in game, for example - it's beautiful.) [hr][/hr] [h2]Target Audience Summary:[/h2] If you're a tabletop gamer without the luxury of having a consistent local group to play with, it's a no-brainer purchase with one caveat. If you loved Baldur's Gate 3's combat system and are looking to dive into pen and paper gaming based on that experience, this is arguably the best transition mechanism between those two worlds (if there is any better VTT I am just not aware of it), with the same caveat as above. [h3]The caveat:[/h3] While there is a positively [b]bewildering[/b] amount of freely available content (that is ever growing), and said content is positively [b]a pleasure[/b] effort-to-value wise to integrate into your group's world as far as the simplicity of accessing, retrieving, and sharing said content with your player group goes, there [b]IS[/b] some required learning and most likely at least an hour or two of initial configuration and integration with other programs, depending on your individual set-up. [hr][/hr] [h3]Just rambling babble on my experience so far[/h3] Background: Purchased TaleSpire just about a year ago, and have 215 hours into it at the time of this review. Probably the first 50 or 60 of those hours was as a player (our entire group jumped in at the same time, a DM and 5 PCs). We lost 1 player along the way, and as the first campaign ended, that campaign's DM turned one of the NPCs from said campaign into his PC, and my character went off to other business with me taking over as DM for the next campaign with 4 players/characters moving forward into this new campaign. The rest of those hours are me as DM. The first campaign began as a low-fantasy (no magic) world with relatively conventional settings, mostly overworld town/village/wilderness locations, and as it progressed we got more into dungeons, magic was "rediscovered" and the excellent finale was a huge push into what TaleSpire has to offer, dimensional travel shifting quickly between wildly different climates/terrains (a foggy white limbo-space, to a massive glacial battlefield with dozens of frost giants, ice trolls, etc. combatants, to an ancient elven fortress in a jungle, to a thieves den cavern/dungeon, and finally to an infinite library corridor with riddles being the main challenge). The second campaign saw the PCs hurtled across the Astral and ending up in a very strange "bubble", a material-plane massive spherical "eddy" within the Astral plane, with a gateway to plane of air above and a gateway to the plane of water below, altered gravity, and floating islands and debris blasted there by magical mishaps across the realms/planes as well as detritus dragged into the eddy there from the Astral itself, over thousands of years. This campaign has seen the PCs on "astralroid" like floating bodies, with ancient fortresses and tombs embedded in chunks of rock ripped from worlds long forgotten, a massive, sprawling, heavily enchanted three-tier city/urbanscape. An ancient floating palace/citadel, an "Astral Mos Eisley" type tavern that sees celestials and liches socializing or conducting business at tables feet apart, and even some ship to ship boarding actions in the strange open space of this odd place. The point of sharing all of that is that TaleSpire has allowed us to immerse ourselves in all of that in a hugely entertaining way. Both the engine itself, AND the absolutely stellar amount of community content (check out [url=talestavern.com] TalesTavern[/url] great example) have really allowed for some incredible creativity and immersion you're just not ever going to achieve with a 2D VTT, or even an in-person table-top experience (unless you're a multi-millionaire with a huge amount of space in your dedicated gaming hangar.) For me, learning as I go, I did start out with a relatively simple "giant blob of rock" (one of these kind of "asteroid-like" bodies floating around in this place) as the scene where the players were thrust into the campaign. I watched a couple of building tutorials, and then grabbed some "slabs" off of TalesTavern (some cool fortresses) which you literally just copy to your clipboard, alt-tab back into TaleSpire, CTRL+V and you have a fully furnished ruined castle you can drag anywhere and then sink into the terrain. I then added in a few chunks of rock to shore up parts that were just hanging in the air, added 3 other separate ruins areas, added friendly and enemy NPCs (hid some from view, and created some DM-only hidden markers with DC values for passive perception checks), and then populated the area with various props from the plentiful sets available in the base game and integrated community content. I used what is called a "hide volume" to mask a giant Githyanki Astral Dreadnaught (again, snipped right off of TalesTavern) and revealed it late into a massive battle as the party successfully signaled an allied ship to come and get them in the nick of time. That was my very first session (Oct 2025), and my understanding and familiarity/comfort with the interface and options has only grown since. As of this writing, the party is delving into an ancient tomb with a complicated past (it has floated in this "eddy" for hundreds of years), and is currently in a very close fight where they are learning the pros (channeling the enemy into a killing zone) of using a hallway as a tactical advantage, as well as the cons (eating a lightning bolt directly down said hallway). It is a decent amount of work, and if you really get into it, it's a lot of work (compared to a 2D VTT), but for players that demand more, for players that experienced the amazing combat options offered by Baldur's Gate 3 or Divinity Original Sin for example, it is absolutely worth the player and DM/GM learning curves respectively.